COMPACT TREE FOR STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL OF STRUCTURED HYPERMEDIA DOCUMENTS

摘要

A compact tree representation is used during the electronic storage, transmission, and presentation of a structured hypermedia document (25) in a networked computer. All text portions of the documents are pre-processed by a document parser (30) and the resulting document structure is stored in compact and compressed form in a persistent object storage (31) while the document content (32) is available in a compressed and indexable form consistent with full text retrieval systems. During document delivery, the compact representation of the document (33, 39) is retrieved from the persistent object storage and transferred to a client computer (22), which reconstructs the document and presents it to a user (36). Any arbitrary structured document type can be stored and delivered this way. The CT representation can be partitioned dynamically or by preprocessing to allow the client to retrieve parts of the document incrementally, for non-linear or temporally ordered access. The CT representation can be used for group collaboration applications, including document sharing and document authoring applications.